"Don't worry!" Noah is a farmer. Noah taking a break to work in the tea gardens of Yunnan Province, China.

I remember a trip to Yunnan Province, China, when I took some time to work, to really dig in, alongside local farmers. It had been a good day of walking and doing farm assessments in the tea lands, and I took a break from the certification work to clear weeds with some of the farmers. We stood on a steep hillside, tilling with a large steel hoe. I noted that both the steel and the wood handle of the tool were fabricated in the nearby village. The people working beside me are a group of hired laborers. They all have gardens for their own food and for small market crops. Like me, they are farmers at home who are hired for outside work as well.

As we weed, I throw my body into the work just as I do in Montana or anywhere, and my translator is busy gesticulating and hurriedly explaining that I know how to do this, that I'm like them: a farmer. They get it, after the inital surprise, and for a short time we fall into a working routine. It feels good, and days like this, farming feels right, natural and I feel like I belong. It's not always that clear.

When we tell our friends and family that we are farmers, we sometimes get puzzled reactions. On a good day, we tell them that this is the best decision we've made. Building soil and growing food and community feels like the best thing we can be doing. The other days are more complicated. There are a lot of reasons small farms everywhere - not just here in the US - are in danger. As we continue to work toward making farming a larger part of our livelihood, we're thinking carefully about what, exactly, is needed--not just by us, but by farmers in general. Here's our current list:

Mary separates onion starts and prepares to plant in one of our raised beds.

1. Access to land. Although not all farmers own the property they farm, the bottom line is that you can't grow food without soil. If that soil is not owned by the farmer, the acess to the land needs to be clear and secured for long enough that investments of time, energy and inputs can take shape and pay off over time. In our own land search, we've found that it gets even more complicated when you want to live on that land. It's not too hard to rent a field or pasture somewhere, and in theory a farmer can commute to their crops. But for us, being close to it all to tend animals a few times a day and generally keep an eye on things seems the only logical way to farm. That land also needs some water - in our warming climate, getting water to our crops is more important than ever.

2. Mentors. Farming is a continual learning process, and farmers need good mentors--people we can call on for advice on how to put up a fence, whether to harvest or cover when a frost is coming, how to build a router table or treat an ailing animal. It can take a lot of mentors, with different areas of expertise.

3. Infrastructure. A farm is more than bare soil. Though the level of infrastructure varies with the style and scale of farming, there are needs: for shelters, fences, irrigation equipment, animal transport, tillage and harvesting equipment, and ways to gather organic inputs and transport animals. As we learn to build more and more of our own equipment, we find we find we need more space for the tools and projects to take shape.

4. Community. A farm can't persist, or at least can't provide a livelihood, without the help of other people. That community includes neighbors, supporters, and friends; for us, bringing people onto to the farm to gather in community is an important part of the process. Some are nearby, like the neighbors who stop by to drop off a sample of their favorite beans and a promise to save some good seeds if we like them too. Others read, advise, or support us from afar. And the community, of course, includes markets: in order to make a living, even part of a living, at this, we need people who are willing to pay for what the farm produces.

5. Raw guts. In order to find the right blend of the above, it takes a lot of courage. Whether it's building your own garden carts, chicken coops, and fences, or reaching out for help and neighboring, putting the ingredients together for a sucessfull farm takes a lot of work.

Our main garden and gate, before opening and working in the morning.

It's a difficult game; being a farmer these days takes a lot of balance. My friend Ron Goddard, a cowboy who has traveled all over the American West, first cowboying and now being a mentor to beginning ranchers, says that 'Farmers and ranchers need to make as much as someone in Silicon Valley. They need to be able to afford health insurance and afford to travel.' We are learning, bit by bit, what it might take to do that, knowing we need so many peices, but hopeful that we can fit them together. Not to make as much as someone in Silicon Valley, but at least to support ourselves and contribute to our community.

In our garden, Delicata Squash have a special nickname. Though they are one of our favorite varieties of winter squash, we refer to them mostly as "unauthorized cucurbita." Some plants we love for their flavor, their easy growth, heavy yields, or their striking colors. The Delicata has all that. But some plants we also love for the story they carry of their origin, or our personal discovery of them. The unauthorized cucurbita is one of those, with a history special to us.

When we were first courting, I was teaching at a small college in Oregon, and Noah was working in a wide range of places in Asia and Africa, based out of Malaysia. It's not easy to woo someone from several continents away, but we managed, exchanging long and involved letters by email for months. The first tangible letter came in a mysterious package Noah mailed between assignments when back at his home base in Kuala Lumpur. He'd alluded to something coming in the real mail in the electronic letters, but I had no idea what to expect. The box, when it arrived, released a potent mix of exotic smells into the air of my Oregon porch: cloves from Madagascar, farm-cured vanilla beans, coffee from Tanzania. All were carefully labelled in plastic bags with the bright yellow tape I now know also marks all Noah's photo gear. Deep inside the box was one very official and cryptic sheet of paper with the US customs stamp and a record of one confiscated item, listed as "Unauthorized Propagative Material: Cucurbita spp." I am enough of a botanist to know that must mean seeds of something in the genus Cucurbita. But that includes melons, cucumbers, and a whole host of varieties of squash and gourds. I wondered what special exotic forest-edge seeds he might have tried to send, and what their fate was at the US border.

It turned out that in fact they were nothing so exotic, and of all the things in that package, the only one that actually originated in the US. Knowing that spring was coming in the Pacific Northwest, he'd enclosed a packet of seeds he'd received while filming a farmer training class put on by friends in Wisconsin: Delicata Squash seeds officially grown, packaged, and labeled by High Mowing Seeds, with a USDA stamp. They were certainly the most official and approved item in that box, but the only one held up at the border.

Luckily, on returning to the US later that spring, Noah brought another packet to replace them, and I planted them in the small garden of my new Forest Grove home. With such a history, and a tendency toward metaphor, I kept an extra careful eye on those plants as they grew in the raised bed garden that summer: a slow start, one seedling eaten by slugs, a bout of powdery mildew. But they grew right through all of that, through tough clay soil and no small number of weeds. Through some smokey hot August days and into the drizzling Oregon fall. By the time Noah moved permanently back to the US and joined me in the above-garage apartment we referred to as The Treehouse, we had an impressive basketful of striped oblong "unauthorized cucurbita" fruits: the first Delicata harvest.

This year, we planted an entire 100-square foot bed of them, covering them with protective cloth through early and late season frosts, still with a watchful eye. They produced at least 100 pounds, and we have entered full squash-eating season with delight. They are one of the best squash for simply cutting in half and baking in the oven, then eating with butter and salt, a dash of pesto, or cheese, or maple syrup, depending on your squash-eating inclinations. You might not expect romance in a winter squash. I never did. But it's the surprises in the garden and the growing that are the best gifts.

Sasha, the workshop instructor demonstrates setting the level for the bricks that will form the oven floor and hearth at the opening.

A layer of firebricks forms the floor of the oven. Here we fit them tight together on a bed of sand, trying to leave no cracks or crevices for ash to accumulate. The fire will be built directly on this surface in the completed oven.

With a circle for the oven interior traced onto the bricks, we begin to layer the cob mixture (in the bowl) onto the foundation, around the bricks.

A mound of sand forms the shape that will be the interior of the oven. The sand mold will be removed through the oven door once the cob and plaster have dried.

Smoothing the sand mold with trowels to ensure a symmetrical and smooth interior to the curved oven walls.

Building the brick arch over a mold, to form the oven door. Bricks are mortared together with a simple clay-sand mixture.

Final smoothing of the sand mold. Mary fell in love with the plastering trowels and smoothing process during this workshop.

Participants begin building up the interior layer of the oven; the first layer is a dense clay-sand mixture, without straw.

Next, a layer of dense cob is built up, providing strong structural support and thermal mass to hold the heat of the oven.

After the dense cobb layer for thermal mass, we add a layer of straw coated with clay slip as a thick insulating layer.

A layer of plaster tops the insulation, protecting the oven and providing the smooth outer surface.

Smoothing plaster over the insulation layer. This is a stage where you can add sculptural details, though we kept this oven mostly smooth and simple.

The door of the finished oven from the workshop; as it dries, the sand will be scooped out through the door. Sasha will be able to cook with this oven within the next week.

During the workshop, we cooked in the older ovens at Quail Springs, enjoying pizzas, roasts, and cinnamon rolls prepared at different stages of the ovens' firing. Pizzas are the only thing cooked with the fire still inside; everything else is cooked after the fire is removed, just with the retained heat of the oven walls.

We brought some food gifts from our farm in Missoula to our friends at Quail Springs, and were honored to have our leg of lamb roasted in the earth oven and shared with residents there.

Traveling around the world, I am always amazed at how cool - literally comfortable - farmers' homes can be. On a trip to Cote d'Ivoire, on a project with the Rainforest Alliance, I accompanied farmers to fetch water from a neighboring diversified cocoa farm. While cocoa farms are known for their shade, the trees need regular care and pruning, so it's common for farmers' homes to not have as much shade as they might need during the heat of the day in West Africa. That day when we stepped from a hundred degree sun outside to the interior of an adobe brick hut, though, it was more than ten degrees inside. Later, back in the small town where I spent the night, my concrete hotel room was unbearably hot.

Earth building is not new. While small farms have made shelter and homes out of clay, straw and sand for years, there are still habitable apartment buildings dating back not just hundreds, but thousands of years, and still inhabited. Earth building, commonly known as cob, is taking off in the United States. From pioneers such as the Cobb Cottage company in Oregon, to our network of friends around the United States, there is a growing community of natural builders helping demonstrate that we can have useable structures, spaces, and homes that do not need to be expensive or rely on the industrial economy. While a typical US home might last a lifetime, for many Americans, owning a home can trap us in a cycle of debt.

Precisely for this reason, our own fascination with natural building, and a connection with farmers who utilize this incredible proven technology, we recently traveled to Quail Springs to take an earthen oven building workshop. While I've helped in using natural materials to construct shelters for farmers in Africa and Asia, nothing beats more hands on experience. While we intend to construct some cob buildings on our farm in the coming years, we cannot wait to build an oven. When our friends put out the word they were hosting a workshop to build an earthen oven, it was easy to decide we'd make the journey to California. We jumped at the chance.

Basic cobb building is an approximate mixture of 1 part clay, 2 parts sand, and straw (though the ratios change depending on the texture of each of your materials). For building walls or for adding layers of thermal mass and insulation, you vary the ratio. While in our cold climate of Montana, we may need more insulation, the basic building materials and methods vary only slightly.

Now that we are back in Montana, we are planning on building our own farm oven later this spring. We're itching to get our hands back into that earthen mix, but have to face up to the deeply frozen days coming our way, and will have to content ourselves with a few test-bricks mixed indoors, until we have the land and weather to work with in the spring. We've already talked about building some ovens with some great local partners. During our last night at Quail Springs, we cooked lamb we brought from Montana in one of their ovens. It could not have been a better way to end our trip.

On our farm, we tend to build many of our own spaces - making our home and surrounding space custom-fit to us is just part of our way of living: it's what we do.

My journey of working with wood started rough, acquiring prybars to recycle pallets for our first chicken coop. Since then, we've moved on to acquiring tools, first by borrowing them from our local tool library, and then acquiring our own.

This past week we had a chance to deliver a series of chairs for a neighboring group's upcoming series of rocket stove and meat smithing workshops. The chairs are good for learning, sitting, and talking.

All of the wood in the chairs has a bit of local history: the seat and back slats are made from pine boards that were reclaimed from the Arlee High School gym floor. They came to us in pretty rough shape still full of staples and nails from our friends at Heritage Timber. We spent hours of summer pulling to make the wood useable. We even enlisted family for a big work party on their summer visit. You can still see some of the holes from nails and staples, but all the roughness has been smoothed out. The leg and back supports come from pine trees that were thinned by our friends to manage for bark beetle near the Middle Burnt Fork of the Bitterroot River, a ways upriver of our own homestead. The blue streaks and patches that many of the boards show are the stain from a fungus that is introduced to trees by the bark beetles.

We worked with all of this wood at several stages, planing it to smooth the surfaces and get uniform thickness, ripping the gym floor planks to narrow slats, and rounding the edges of all pieces with the router and sander for smooth and welcoming edges. We like that way that, from a step back, it appears that the knotty white pine is resting on pieces of curved driftwood. These chairs are inspired by a design from a Canadian woodworker and modified by us to accomodate both shorter and taller people. The chairs can be adjusted slightly so they sit up or more reclined, good for listening or reading. They are not dining room chairs, but we do like them for large gatherings. Nothing is wasted with our wood. The wood scraps help heat neighbors' homes and the shavings from the router and planer are used as chicken bedding for our laying hens.

They weigh 13 pounds and, as you see in the images, the legs and seats fit together so they are easy to store and transport. We've tested them with 320 pounds of weight - stacking both of us and our dog onto the seat to ensure that they hold up well. They are guaranteed for life. We finish them with a non-toxic, VOC-free stain that highlights the wood and can ship them all over the United States. They are available for sale to help fund our own hand built life, our farm, and everything that we build each day. We have several available now, other orders ship in two or three weeks. They are available for $69 each and ship for $30 each in recycled packaging. Discounts are available in orders over 12. If you are within driving distance of Missoula, we'll also consider delivery using our vegetable oil car for a bulk order or can arrange to ship via freight for those farther away. You may order the chairs here.

We've been in a bit of a frenzy here lately, getting ready to leave the farm to attend a workshop at Quail Springs. The trip preparation happens against a background of wrapping up harvests, processing food, a major woodworking project (the first one with a deadline and a payment), and some serious thoughts and planning about our next move. At the moment our beloved barnboard kitchen table reflects that chaos: baskets of squash and ripening tomatoes share the space with a DeWalt drill, a bottle of wood glue, the extra-large first-aid box and some pruning shears.

In the midst of all this end-of-season activity, it seems like a good week to share something a little less tangible that is also at our table for each dinner meal: a ritual we call gratitudes. Maybe it's the fact that this week started with the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday, or that we are headed to spend time with people who inspired the start of this practice in the first place, but it seemed like a good week to explain and share this simple exercise that has become a regular part of our days.

Each evening when we sit to dinner--even if that is just a quick stop to pick up a slice of pizza while out on errands--we take a moment to each say, out loud, something for which we are grateful. Sometimes the grattitude is one single thing, a clear highlight from the day; sometimes we have a long list, a conversation that continues as we eat. When friends or family join us, it sometimes becomes a series of celebratory toasts.

Homegrown food and gratitude on the barnboard table. Photo by Noah.

Plenty of research shows that expressing gratitude can have powerful benefits on mental health and happiness. We feel those benefits, of course, but the reasoning is less academic than that: simpler and closer to home. It feels good to take those moments to be grateful, and the influence extends past that pre-dinner conversation. I find now that as I cook dinner, while the front of my mind may be focused on gathering and preparing ingredients, another part is gathering and turning over the potential grattitudes for the day. In that sort of unconscious sifting, seeking the best grattitude for the day, so many other small ones are identified and acknowledged, too.

The structure of tying this practice to a meal, something that we do every day, helps enforce the ritual even on days where it takes a little work. Because there are some hard days--days where we sit in silence for a long moment feeling the effort of finding that grattitude. More and more I think those might be the days when it is most important to identify, articulate, and feel it. The ritual is a reminder that there is always something, even on the hardest of days, to be grateful for. We've worked in regions where a daily dinner is not a certainty for everyone, and no matter how bad things might be, we know that if we sit down to dinner there is that: we can be grateful for the food.

We are grateful, this week, for the food that is still, even now, streaming in from the garden: for hundreds of pounds of squash, potatoes, and more piled up in all corners of home, garage, and barn. We are grateful for friends and neighbors who have come to join us at our table with their thoughts, ideas, and offers of help. As the garden winds down, we are grateful for all we have learned and grown and harvested from it this season.

This week we invite you to try the practice yourselves, on your own table. What are you grateful for today? Feel free to share your gratitudes in the comments here, or aloud to the people you gather with at your table.

We moved to Missoula last year just a few days after pulling our garlic from the ground in Oregon. We packed two burlap coffee sacks with green garlic and stuffed them into the U-Haul as the final cargo. Opening the door of that moving van when we arrived unleashed a powerful and unique smell mixture: garlic, green coffee beans, and waste vegetable oil (fuel for our car). We hung it to finish curing in the entryway of our small summer sublet apartment.

When it came time to plant garlic last fall, we realized we wanted a crop a good bit larger than what we could spare from our own stocks without being garlic-poor all winter. We also though it would be good to get something we knew for sure could handle a solid Montana winter. We got a gift of a mix of hardneck varieties from some friends in Wisconsin who came to visit and even helped us plant last fall.

Garlic drying in the barn of friends in Wisconsin. They brought us bulbs to plant from the stock they have been growing for years. Photo by Noah.

We also asked around for good varieties and good deals from local farmers and were lucky to get ahold of Josh Slotnick just after his crew had planted their garlic at the PEAS Farm, and he gave us a great deal on ten pounds of seed garlic. He had to think hard about what variety it might have started out as, and we’re still not sure. He’s been saving the best cloves to replant each year for so long--more than fifteen years--that we just knew it must be pretty well adapted to our area. It's a softneck, which makes it good for long storage. The Wisconsin garlic blend were hardnecks--larger cloves with stronger flavors that have added a powerful kick to our pestos this summer.

If you got a bulb of garlic in your last coffee mailing, it was one of those Missoula softnecks. We tucked the gifts into the boxes with the special satisfaction of sharing something straight from the soil here. It grew in the smaller of our two gardens all summer, the first thing that went into the ground in our time on this farm, and the first thing to emerge as a sign of spring. It cured and dried in the hayloft of the barn this summer and hadn't left the farm till it went to the post office in your box. It's wonderful to cook with of course, but if you haven't eaten the whole bulb yet, consider planting a clove or two for your next summer. It's garlic planting time in much of the US; we'll be getting ours into the ground again sometime soon. We might branch out to a few different known-and-named varieties, but we’ll also stick with some of our unnamed gift varieties that allowed us to store up our largest garlic harvest yet, this year.

This year's garlic harvest, waiting in the shade to be spread in our hayloft to dry and cure. We were a little late to harvest, but hope it will still store well.

This weekend we left our place for a few days, headed north to spend time at another homestead. We left late in the afternoon after the chores of moving chickens, harvesting another cartload of squash, covering other garden beds, and putting up some more food. At this time of year it sometimes seems hard to get away. There's always something to do in the garden, in the office, in the shop, the last of the harvest to gather and tend to, garlic to plant. Yet, with the seasons changing, we feel the pull to neighbor.

Driving up, we pass homestead after homestead. With each mile there's evidence of some places thriving, while others are on less firm footing. Getting away from our farm is a kind of therapy for us - seeing the homesites and other rolling farms, those of our friends, is good perspective. We laugh together at stories about batches of wine that didn't quite go as well as planned--bottles that explode in kitchens from too lively of yeast. We feel the ache of the story of the home that burned, but smile in releif at the ways that our friends reclaimed some boards from that old homestead. Those salvaged boards appear in the outbuildings, shops, and spaces that have helped them claim a livelihood and a life that was hand-built. We strive for that life, ourselves.

Part of us, you see, feels like one of those old homesteads - we've built so much of ourselves as growers of food and community this past year. Moving the farm, even with as little infrastructure as we have, we think, sometimes, might just do us in.

But it's the other times that count, times of gathering and building. We took our apples, and those of our friends, as we do each year about this time. We gathered, making cider, telling stories, reveling in a sauna, eating good food, wearing out our dog, and then, doing it the next day. You might call it cider making, but we also call it gathering and reclaiming.

We're happily in the season of a little of everything in our meals these days. More and more of the harvest is piling up inside our house as it comes in from the garden. And I mean piling up very literally: on shelves, in buckets and boxes and baskets on every surface. Part of what that means is a fantastic span of ingredients within easy reach. The other part is that every evening we jump into some sort of food-preserving project, many of which last late into the night. Someday we may have a root cellar, a greenhouse, or even just more storage space. But for now, we have 200 pounds of winter squash in the living room and I'm grateful for every one of them.

For the most part we are not using any of the preserved food yet, just reveling in the freshness still available. It's a luxury for a quick and easy stir fry to have both red and green onions, green and yellow summer squash, green bell pepper and and red sweet peppers, both. Not to mention the red cabbage and green cabbage...both, and all of it from a browse through the fridge and harvest buckets.

A simple stir-fry has a full range of colors at this time of year as we have just about everything to choose from. Late summer garden on brown rice. Photo by Noah.

Lately that little-of-everything stir fry has been topped with one of our first batches of preserved food: Kimchee. We started experimenting with natural fermentation this summer, and on one epic night of pickling in August we made our first batch of sauerkraut and our first venture into Kimchee all at once. Our friends who came over to help pickle were following more traditional Korean methods for this spicy condiment (including mysterious and partially-translated pepper spice packets sourced from Asian grocers in towns much larger than Missoula) but we went with, as they put it, "the hippie version."

We used the recipe from the "Nourishing Traditions" book that includes Napa cabbage, onions, garlic, hot peppers, carrots, and ginger. We mixed everything with salt and pounded it in a large bowl till the leaves softened and juices start to form. After that we just packed it into quart mason jars that sat on the counter for 4 or 5 days. We left town for a few of those days for Noah's birthday--completely unrelated to the fact that the action of the naturally occurring beneficial bacteria that immediately started to work can produce, well, a strong smell. The neighbor stopping by to feed the cats while we were gone was diplomatic enough not to mention anything. If you try this, do be warned that the juices will overflow, and you'll have a distinct sour-pickle smell for a few days (but it's really not that bad). And it's worth it! This batch came out as a refreshing tangy gingery, slightly spicy condiment that we've been putting on top of just about everything.

Our first batches of Kimchee have been topping a lot of dishes already. The three quarts we made might not last as long as we'd expected. Photo by Noah.

On a recent rainy afternoon in this season of shifting weather, we squatted in one of our friend's growing fields at the County Rail Farm in Dixon, Montana. Margaret and Tracy farm in this fertile valley that has a unique microclimate just a bit different than our own. While we have had our first hard frost, they are still harvesting some of their crops - rows of cucumbers and greens still wait in the field while squash cure for storage in their green houses.

Pumpkins Drying in a Hoop House, County Rail Farm.

The weather was typical for these edge of season days, so we huddled in the back of their pickup truck under the drumming rain picking edamame (green soybeans) from boxes of harvested plants. Later, when the rain lessened, we dug their last potatoes from the ground. That was one of the only chances we've had, in this busy growing season, to work alongside and reflect with other farmers. Though our own potatoes were still in the ground back home, it felt good to dig alongside them, sharing conversation and growing thoughts as we worked down the row.

Work Party: Harvesting Soybeans from the Vine.

Here in Montana we have to become experts at pushing plants. Vegetables were not all designed to grow in the conditions we raised them in. We try to shift the odds by purchasing seeds from farms who test their vegetable varieties and grow them with the harsh winters of Vermont, Maine and our own valley. And we push the ends of the seasons in each direction, with early indoor starts in the spring and row covers to ward of the frosts both spring and fall.

Even the simple act of watering separates our garden plants from the yearly rhythms of the native plants and even the untended pasture grasses outside the fence, which turned their own shades of late-summer gold and brown when the rains slowed down. We distracted ourselves a bit from the passing season too, within that lush quarter acre of soft greens, tomatoes, peas, and more. Outside the fence, chokecherries ripened, and the grasshoppers hatched, grew, and disappeared. It's not that we did not notice any of the seasonal progressions--we saw the spring Draba come and go to seed, noticed the split dry pods of Lupine when we went hiking. But we also, like the tomatoes, were taken by surprise by that hard frost and end of the warm growing season.

Maybe with more years here, we will learn the subtle triggers within the garden that the season was winding down. It takes time to learn the small cues, to put them all together. Mary's fieldwork in native grasslands was a daily immersion in prairie patterns, but it was a few years in before she could recognize, without analysis, that because the Camas pods were dry and rattling, it was time to check for young seeds forming on the Lemonweed plants. There are probably subtle signals that we have missed, here. We've missed other triggers, other clues, maybe even mis-judged how long we'd be able to stay here growing on this patch of land.

Still, when we take time out to harvest the last of this season or sit in our farmers friend's kitchens after a long day of work, we gather what we can. We go over our mental notes of this past season - what we noticed, the wild successes (green peas for months on end), the wild failures (ask us sometime about that okra crop), and near misses (see our Sheep Chase story), and all that has got away from us. We talk about the hard things - the lonesomeness that can come with long days out or other work left off the plate; gifts from neighbors who lent a hand when we needed it most. Farmers do things differently from a lot of people, and now that we've farmed for a year, raising food for ourselves and our neighbors, we think differently too. We make our own tools, furniture, fixes and even games.

Whiffle Ball with over-ripened cucumbers.

When we left the campfire the other night, there was singing. It's hard to leave in the middle of any story, but as we say, we were farmer-tired, already worried about putting in the chickens, and tending to evening chores. Even though we have cancelled our own harvest party because we aren't sure where we will farm in the years to come, our calendar is full of harvest parties - a place where secrets are shared, plans are hatched, we eat, and know we can begin next day.

On the table this week is a meal that we also delivered to friends as part of a neighborly dinner exchange. Fall started this week by both the calendar and the temperatures, but we're still considering this a summer dish. It's one that literally stuffs in some of the best of summer.

The inspiration comes from those overgrown zucchini and summer squash that have gotten away from us in the past few days while there was so much to harvest. It's great to have a use for them other than as baseball bats or chicken feed.

This, like much of what comes to our table, has is no exact recipe. So, instead, we invite you to follow along in a general guide to see how we made these this week:

1. Sautee a small handfull of onion and garlic in oil in a heavy pot. Add a rice or grain blend and stir with the onions and garlic. We had a mix of brown rice, wild rice, and lentils on hand, but anything would work--straight rice, quinoa, etc.. After rice has toasted a bit and been coated with oil, add water and bring up to a boil.

2. Turn the grains down to a simmer while heading out to garden to pick other vegetables to include. Allow yourself to be distracted by chicken feeding and other garden tasks; harvest the entire row of black beans to bring into the barn to dry (optional of, course, but that's how we did it).

3. Remember that there is rice on the stove, and pick up the pace a bit to find some good vegetables to include: red cabbage, carrot, onion, garlic, eggplant, green peppers. Also pick those giant, ones-that-got-away zucchini and summer squash, relishing the knowledge that you finally have a good use for them.

4. Back in the kitchen, chop up all the veggies of choice into small cubes and stir-fry lightly. Mix the veggies with the rice and any spices or sauces you like (this time we went with ginger and garlic sauce from a favorite recipe book on seasonal eating: ).

5. Cut the zucchini and summer squash in half, scoop out the seeds and inner pulp to make space for stuffing, and pack the rice and vegetable mixture inside.

6. Put the stuffed squashes on a tray and bake at 375 for around 40 minutes, or untill the outer squash is soft. Pull out and top with additional fresh garlic-ginger sauce.

7. Arrange on plates, deliver to neighbors, then sit down at a barnboard table to enjoy.

This week, what we share from our table will also be on a table next door as part of a dinner-exchange we started with some friends who live, as we like to say "one pasture over." These properties used to be connected by family ties, and the path through the pasture is much shorter than the official way around by road and driveways. It hasn't taken much to refresh that well-worn path with some neighboring including, lately, passing back and forth with food to share, a couple of nights a week.

The genesis of this weekly routine came from a point that came up on many visits and meals together: we live with small kitchens with no dishwashers, and we all make a lot of dishes. It came to a peak one night when we gathered in our small kitchen to put up some food together--a madness of chopping, shredding, and mixing to start kimchee and sauerkraut, feeding literally and figuratively off of the combined energy of two households to get us through a massive pile of produce.

We stopped for a moment in that wild pickling evening to eat dinner together before gearing up for the next step. As we looked around we had to laugh at the state of the place: cutting boards, knives, and bowls had been shuffled to the coffee table to make room to eat at the kitchen table; buckets and boxes of cabbage, onion, and carrots were piled in the corner of the room. The kitchen sink was topped over, and each work-station at the counter was carved out of a mountain range of dishes and cooking materials.

Cooperative pickling night with neighbors: a kitchen mess not as far out of the daily realm as you might imagine. Photo by Noah.

And yet, we all had to admit that while this was completely crazy, it was also just an expansion of the ebb and flow of our daily kitchen work. We cook from scratch, we cook from the garden, and we get caught up in the excitement of good food. It does make a lot of good work and good food, of course, but also a lot of dishes. We realized, as we talked, that cooking for four people makes no more cleanup than cooking for two, and we should really all take advantage of that.

We decided on an exchange where each household would, on one night of the week, cook for both and deliver extra to the other. It gives us each one evening a week of having only the dishes that we eat off of to wash. We used some guidelines we'd seen from others doing similar exchanges: no pressure to make anything fancy, no need to stay and visit if evenings were busy. If someone has other plans or is out of town on drop-off night, they use it the next day. It's simple, and yet the knowledge that a meal will be delivered and shared has inspired an occasional extra touch and elevates our own eating just a bit. It might just be taking a moment to arrange sliced tomatoes or a basil garnish across the top of the pasta or to array the red peppers on a pizza into a star instead of a random toss. At the surface it's just decoration, but underneath it's also a demonstration of caring, and that makes it special. A care that, we remind ourselves in the midst of busyness, uncertainty and stresses, needs to be both taken and received.

The exchange started because of dishes, but in a small way it is much more, too. When we deliver the pan of stuffed summer squash across the pasture, there's a pleasure in the feeling of giving and nurturing, of feeding our friends. When a dish of steaming rice, greens, and chickpeas arrives at our door at the end of a long day, we sit down to it with gratitude that goes so far beyond not needing to clean the kitchen. It's gratitude for neighbors, for friends, for caring and being cared for in some small way.

When food preservation gets serious, even the shop tools may find their way into the home kitchen: Noah pounds cabbage for sauerkraut with the large mallet. This will find its way into a shared neighbor meal soon, after weeks of fermenting in the corner by the bookshelf.

You might say that I found a secret life, back in one of the deepest hidden places in the interior of Borneo. I spent a lot of my days there walking forest trails, gathering forest foods and searching, with experts, for wild meat in the tropical forests. We would start late in the day, sometimes even in the night, and often we'd go all night on charged AA batteries. We'd walk the rivers, past the forest farm plots where we spent our other time, stuffing our backpacks with roots, shrimp, fruits, and fish. I fell into a rhythm, and the weeks turned easily into months. The time for planting rice came, and though I knew I'd gained friendship, trust, and knowledge from my late night excursions, it was digging into the steep mountain slopes that changed my life. For weeks, I woke each morning in elevated tropical timber houses carved out of the very forest edge where we were farming. After coffee and rice we'd start our day by planting one of 17 different rice varieties that the community I was living with saved and planted each year. We used so many types in order to hedge against drought, pest, disease, storms, or too much rain. We all planted these different varieties, every family in the village, on different slopes with different soils. I stayed for the planting season, and the planting became a way of living. We'd plant family to family, along a vast forest edge in food gardens that were connected to each other. I'd sleep in different houses, depending on what land parcel we finished working on each day. One night, after glasses of rice wine, we all got to talking about someone who could taste soil. Of course, any of us can take a taste of soil; we all end up with earth in our mouths, sometimes. But the story, the magic, was that this individual could discern the type of soil by that taste--what it held, what it could support, even what it might be missing in order to grow the best rice or other foods.

Durian Fruit Tree, famous for its seeds. Photo by Noah.

I couldn't get this out of my mind, the story of the soil taster, as I worked and planted in the days that followed. So a guide and I set out searching. We looked for days, camping along forest trails, abandoned camps, in old mango and durian fruit groves where communities once lived. We never found him. Or, to be truthful, we found one of his relatives, much later, who didn't quite believe the story.

While I've heard that there are still people who can taste and know soil, the fact that this knowledge and possibility was lost there with this one individual bothered me. Weeks later, with the planting season finished, I hiked out - a long day hike to a logging road on my own. I didn't need a guide anymore, I could speak some of the local dialect, some bahasa, and I trusted the hand drawn map of river intersections, hunting trails, and landmarks - beehives, ironwood and beetlenut trees.

Still based in Asia after this experience, I secretly drifted. I traveled everywhere, living and farming with communities. I was paid as a consultant to travel even further and work with more distant farmers in East and West Africa. I had a growing fear that farming was eroding just as I was capturing it, across all these continents. Whether it was along the vanilla trail in Madagascar, or the highlands of Papua New Guinea, I had a hunch that something was wrong. In one assignment, I was a mediator in an effort to document high value lands for an Asian government. One evening, a villager and friend tired of my questions, tired of the effort to mark some spaces more important than others, 'it's all valuable. We need all this space to grow our food, to live, to nurture.'

A forest landscape image made from a logging road in the interior of Borneo. Fruit trees that shelter community gardens are revealed as a rain storm passes. Image by Noah.

At the height of that consultant career, I bought a satelite phone to transmit some of these stories of farm and forest community struggle to a wider audience. Along the lines of transmission, though, or by the strike of a delete key in the United States, my worries about farmers losing land, losing knowledge, and not having support were often lost or diluted.

Back in Malaysia, where I lived, I dove in deeper, working on permaculture farms. I started traveling with small teams of farmers to document land conversion, injustice, power relations, and banned chemicals.

On one difficult assignment, where I had carried my video camera for miles without getting any good footage, I sat down out of frustration. I had a long hard look that day at where I was, where my own roots might be. My friend's own food garden back in the United States needed tending. I had started a long distance relationship with a woman who loved digging in and growing too. I didn't know yet if she tasted soil, but I had seen her smell it, breathing in Oregon coastal forest loam in a familiar way.

So, I knew I had to farm, myself. I wanted to be with people, to grow community, actively, putting the camera down, doing the work. I knew that I might never have any land that I owned outright, but I craved land where I could sink roots, stay, and by caring for it, feel that mutual support. Now that we might have to leave the land we had been growing on, after a year of growing all of our own food, and much much more, Mary and I are in deep. We know just how those farmers feel when there is a storm in the night, when our sheep are threatened, or when another parcel nearby, that could be someone's farmland, is sold off or built on.

There comes a time in every story teller's life when there is nothing left to do but to act: to synthesize what knowledge can be found, and, as one farmer put it at a workshop here 'you just have to start.'

We don't know where this journey will take us, and this writing, but it is our attempt to dig in, to find our own tribe, to be a part of planting and preserving the rich diversity of foods: to find 17 varieties of something. To become the people who we chase, in stories and in our daily work, building our own soil, growing roots, ourselves and one another.

If you think of farming as some sort of dance with the elements, this time of year is the tense and highly-charged Latin pas-de-deux between grower and the nightly low. The weather entered our corner of river bench this week with a new, more serious rhythm, and tapped our unsuspecting shoulders with the first notes of frost. There is no choice but to join that dance, listening to that sky, that wind, that rising breath of air up from the river. We make careful circling steps now, especially as night falls and we try to match every move of this new dancer. Every inch of skin feels the touch of this weather partner that can turn crazy at any moment this time of year. Last night we met it close in, face to face, felt the breath of cold and unfurled folds of remay. The white row-cover cloth billowed under the full harvest moon: a flourish and twirl to wrap basil, pepper, eggplant, against that frosty pass. We left the garden under that cold moon, uncertain what how close that frost might come.

It made its own flourish while we slept, and morning, though sunny, showed the moves: black tips of basil, lower stems left green; topmost squash leaves with a new dry rustle. It was a light pass, just a quick kiss of frost, not the big one yet. But the dance has started, and we lock eyes on the weather, feeling that exchange, the push-pull of sun, cold, cover, and harvest; seeking the last hours of growing when it all counts so much. Summer ends in just two days, and it only gets more dramatic from here on out.

We knew from the start that the goal of growing most of our own food would inevitably change our eating habits. We don’t want to take on a 100-mile diet experiment or make cooking and eating into a complicated set of rules. But we do want to source as much of our daily food as possible from our own growing spaces and gatherings. More and more we find ourselves looking at our plates and saying, with a new sort of satisfaction "wow, we grew all of this."

We're making a little space here to share with you what finds its way from our gardens to our table as we move through the seasons. In these posts we'll highlight one meal each week that shows how we are making use of the ingredients we've grown, gathered, and put up. We invite you to join us at the table by trying these meals out yourself, planting some of these ingredients into your next garden, or leaving a comment or link to what is on your own table these days.

This week, we're sharing these stuffed California Wonder bell peppers. We consider any good stout mature peppers in Montana to be a wonder, and these, though their name says “California” have done great in our sometimes-chilly valley. We hope to stretch another week or two of growing season before the big frosts, to let some of them ripen to red (though they are tasting great green, too).

To make this, we took some of our biggest bell peppers and cut off the tops to pull out the seeds and cores. The inside filling is sautéed from-the-garden garlic, onions, Jimmy Nardello peppers, coriander seed, jalapeños, sweet corn, and black beans (our first effort growing dry beans has also been an exciting venture). Mixed with a bit of brown rice, olive oil, and local cheese (not ingredients we've managed to grow ourselves yet), we stuffed the filling into the peppers, set them upright in a baking dish, and roasted them at 375. Pulled out after 30 minutes, we topped them with fresh tomatoes and the salsa we made while they baked.

I'm not sure that an advanced wine-and-food connoisseur would chose blackberry wine as the best pairing for this, but, well, it's what we have because it's what we've made! For these homesteaders at least, the stuffed peppers went beautifully with the Oregon blackberry wine and a slice of homegrown Golden Midget watermelon for dessert.

A meal of stuffed peppers, garden melon, and our own blackberry wine, on the barnboard table. Photo: Noah Jackson

The big-picture view of the garden is stunning, and we often pause at the gate to take it all in. But there's something special in the close-in details too, which are often found as surprises--like when checking the ripeness of sunflower heads reveals a sleepy, slow-moving bumblebee still curled into the fold of petals.

The morning garden check found this bumblebee slowly beginning to wake and warm after a night hidden in the sunflower head. Photo: Mary Bricker

It’s wildfire season in Montana. This plume was from an evening when the fire made a huge jump in size, and had us wondering if it might even come over to this side of Blue Mountain.

It was a simple enough phrase, the short, shocking sort of call that can wrench a farmer out of bed at any hour: "Noah, the sheep are gone!" It was about the last news Mary wanted to bring from an early morning round of chores with a big day of garden-harvest planned. But this task needed both of us, and Noah was up and ready in a heartbeat at those words. The dangers of farming vary by region, of course, but wherever they are based, nothing rips farmers out of a deep sleep quite like the knowledge that some portion of the year's food or income is gone or in danger.

For our friends in the coffee lands of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, it can be torrential rains that bring the fear of landslides. For ranchers in Eastern Montana, it might be the threat of late spring hail and snow in calving season. We are gradually learning the challenges of our space here between Western Montana hills.

That morning was not the first time our sheep had escaped. After one June thunderstorm, they'd shown up in a neighbor's pasture just down the road. That morning, even before 6 am, several neighbors rallied together to gather our herd. But this day was different. The Lolo Complex fires had doubled in size the night before, fueled by dramatic winds, and the the whole valley had that smokey ominous light. We knew that when we closed our garden gate late the night before we had scared a herd of deer that thundered out of the pasture. If that was what had taken down some of the electric fence, it was possible the sheep had been loose for almost eight hours already. We had no idea where or how far they might have gone.

After a hopeful first check of the property, we had to expand the search, and cruised the neighborhood in the farm truck, peering into pastures, knocking on doors, ducking through fences and behind barns of people we barely know, some we still haven't met. It's not the best way to meet your neighbors, wide eyed and tense, with an opening line of "our sheep are missing; they escaped in the storms last night."

So, we scoured river bottoms, crashed through brushy thickets and back pastures, crossing surprising little streams and holding barbed wire strands apart for each other. We began to form a whole new mental map of our rural neighborhood, surprising connections and secret-feeling passages. But the growing worry and frustration overshadowed any sense of excitement of discovery. We couldn't help but think of the stories from Ivan Doig's latest book The Bartenders Tale, which had helped us through some a winter drive this past year. The sheepherder Canada Dan is one of those rough western holdouts: independent, tough and weathered, a little outside of normal society. One day, also after big storms, he drags himself back to the Medicine Lodge bar, the center of the town, swearing never to go back to that work again after losing a whole herd of sheep in a surprise lightening storm. Growing grim and tense ourselves, we exchanged looks, admitting that there was a chance these sheep, our flock of five, was flat-out gone. We could feel a new kinship with Canada Dan, worn down and ready to be done with it all, wondering what it would be like to be one of these neighbors who were just sitting on a porch enjoying leisurely weekend morning coffee. We wondered what we'd gotten ourselves into. It’s hard not to think about how all the hours of work with these animals could end up being for nothing if we couldn’t find them.

The coyotes who inhabit the nearby butte warned us and the dogs away from their particular rocky knoll on a morning hike this July. We are very wary that our sheep pasture less than one mile away from one of the dens.

And yet, at the same time, we could be grateful that these sheep were not our complete and only income--grateful that we started small, and hadn't bet everything on the sale of a flock. Because it seemed more than likely that these sheep had headed far out. We're starting to think of ourselves as farmers now, at least in a small way, subsistence farming with the goal of eating the whole year almost exclusively what we have grown here; it's exciting and satisfying. But those moments of lost sheep can feel frighteningly powerless...what does one do with five sheep missing completely? We even considered calling in to the public radio station, like one might for a lost dog. In the end, we just kept searching. It was all we could do.

Back when we started working together in Forest Grove, we thought we were really getting into it with our eight hens, one bag of coffee, pilot coffee course, and coffee CSA. And we were learning, digging in, starting our roots and even our homesteading in that triple city lot. Some of you who have been with us since the start remember that first roast, the Chicken Chaser, named for those first forays into our home-growing and our coffee and farmer partnerships.

We are in so much deeper now. Back then the chickens, the handful of raised beds, the greens in the garden window, the coffee, the student programs were additions, sidelines to other work and more-standard jobs. Now it's a quarter acre garden, 21 hens, and the small herd of lambs intended to supply the year's meat for us and a neighboring family. Not only that, it's a growing coffee CSA in Missoula, steadily increasing list of mail supporters, coffee picked up by pallet instead of individual bag, and an all-out effort to launch a student course. We have let go of the stability of our old jobs, and the farming and the Forest Voices work has become our attempts at livelihood, so the stakes are so much higher now.

Mary prepares to open our improptu sheep trailer after we've moved them over to a pasture we share with neighbors.

When the sheep are out or the corn blows down, we feel those higher stakes now in a way that we didn't before. And yet, we still have backups, still have some security. Even if those sheep were never found, we'd have lost investments and time, but we wouldn't go bankrupt, though we'd be eating less meat. If coyotes or raccoons found the chicken coop, we wouldn't go hungry. We'd just have to make fewer omelets.

Many of our farming friends and partners, in contrast, are all in and feel even more acutely those passing storms, rolling fires, and threats to the thin margin between making it and not. Storms in Indonesia are increasing, and while Eko and his team in Java work hard to protect microclimate and reforest degraded slopes, the coffee harvest comes with increasingly unpredictable timing. Many farmers in Vietnam have to rely on a system of corrupt water trucks that ply delivery routes in order to water their vegetables. And once they get the water to the nearest farm road, it still has to reach fruit trees and vegetables through pipe. Those farmers who live too far from good access, have to buy or use a water pump. These are the farmers that can do the math in their head, know how many of gallons of gas, how much time and labor a crop really takes. One thing we've gained in this sometimes tough year of planting and growing is a growing kinship with these farmers who, like us, are often small and often at the edge. Like us, they build stuff, break equipment and learn to fix it.

Our neighbor Sig, who raised hundreds of sheep in this neighborhood at a time when, as he puts it “a pair of Levi’s cost $4,” lends a hand as we load up the sheep in the improvised stock trailer made of straw bales and Noah’s old art-booth panels (below) to move them to new and more-secure pasture. He hasn’t lost any of his sheep-handling skills since those days, and showed us a few good tricks, like how the right hold makes even our biggest sheep easy to put where we want.

Sometimes we question this way, perhaps more often than we should. But there are times when it can be a series of blows--yet another shock from the solar-charged electric fence, another animal out, another repair or trip to the emergency room. We barter for what we can, and more and more, we buy the raw materials, the steel, wood, tools, seeds and animals instead of buying something ready-made. It's all a way to build the soil and skills that, on our best days, make for a hand-crafted life.

We found those sheep again, in the end, not far from home. Just as we had decided things were pretty dire and were returning home for some food and water before launching a several-hour scouring of the neighboring butte and low-lying areas along the river, the second sheep-news exclamation of the day changed our course of action again "Noah, look! The sheep!" Two of them had wandered out of the head-high thicket of thistle across the road where, apparently, they had all passed the morning hunkered down and ignoring our searching and calling. By the time we returned they had wandered up to graze Mike's lawn and drink from the irrigation ditch. With a bit of advanced herding we had all five back into the home pasture within a half-hour.

Perhaps there are metaphors here for our new lives. As we dig deeper in, it's up to us, all of us, to neighbor better, to make those connections we always believed we could have. Sometimes this connection is just lending a hand, helping round up sheep, or discussing a new idea over coffee or a meal. Yet other times, it's the wrangling of some sort of peace, doing deep thinking and acting with ourselves, our land, and neighbors.

We call this member of our flock "The President," affectionately termed because the way this ram leads our entire flock and comes running to us.

A boy in interior Borneo searches for forest tubers to harvest and save before the rainy season.

Oil Palm Extraction

A farmer in a small hamlet processes oil palm late one afternoon in her small family parcel of cocoa, coffee, and fruit.

Maize Store

Elsewhere in West Africa, maize dries in an elevated communal storehouse for months to come.

Hunting Camp, Borneo

An indigenous Penan family processes a wild pig, saving meat, fat, and the entire animal. Meat is smoked and fermented for long term storage.

Garden Harvest, North America

In an old home-kitchen, Noah and Mary harvest freshly harvested garden produce, blanching, freezing and canning.

In our kitchen this evening, as with nearly every evening this time of year (and some afternoons), there is the steady sound of boiling water, glass jars clanging about, and sometimes, just the sound of the freezer door opening and closing. Despite our modern methods, it's an ancient ritual, this collecting and putting away food for the winter: for seasonal feasts, for sharing, and simply to have enough to feed ourselves.

In kitchens all across the United States now, and all over the world, there is a small tribe of us that works with the rhythm of the seasons. Farmers in Asia and Africa sometimes gasp or cluck when I explain that we have a short growing season. Here in Missoula, we average around 120 growing days, so we are always pushing back those margins: starting seeds inside when snow is still on the ground, or planting under a protective fabric row cover.

But when I explain that the rhythm is the same, that most of the food we eat has a cycle, much like maize in Africa, or wheat in China, with the best time to plant, and the best time to harvest, and then preserve or store, farmer's heads nod. In Borneo, I stayed with an indigenous community for some weeks planting 17 varieties of rice. The forest-based community subsisted on rotated parcels of rice, wild fruit gardens, and food - both wild edibles and game - collected from the forest. But, for weeks, we only stopped working in the evenings because all the rice needed to be planted. There, as here, there are distinct times to gather honey, to follow migrating wild pigs, certain fish that are best harvested by the light of the moon.

And so it is the same way here. We exhaust ourselves this time of the year because the harvest is plentiful but so short: 40 pounds of tomatoes yesterday, 18 pounds of vegetables today, all that need a home in a freezer, or glass jar - either canned or fermented.

This time of year, it's easy to start too late, to stay up in the evening. I think of my friends in The Ivory Coast that process palm oil on their small farms, rendering it into the evening. I think of a nomadic family I stayed with, one night when they processed their own cooking oil from a fresh pig - everything needed to be saved.

So, when we pull seeds out of one of our Black Krim heirloom tomatoes, one that didn't split in the rains of the past days. I think, this one, we'll save. This tomato weathered a whole season of growing, including storms, winds, predators that passed through the garden. It didn't get eaten by animals and then it rippened. While I pull the seeds, coyotes howl. I go outside, in the moonlight, and I think I can hear geese, that flew overhead - on the way to warmer weather - roosting. Soon, before we know it, the harvest of this growing season will be over. So, with care, we pick out the seeds slowly, drying them on cotton towels or a cutting board, any corner of the kitchen where there is space. We lay the seeds down, breath, look up at the moon wild eyed and fulfilled, thankful that we share this ritual with a tribe of fellow growers, harvesters, seed savers and preservers.

One of our Black Krim heirloom tomatoes. Image made before fully ripened and seeds for saving were harvested. Photos by Noah Jackson

Why we write. On our home farm, we see connections between what we do and the farmers and people we work with around the world. We share these adventures here to invite you into the learning and community, regardless of where you are located.